Remembering Peter David: A Fallen Angel Crossover

For whatever reason, I woke up this morning remembering a conversation Peter and I had sometime in 2006/2007.

Peter was telling me about an upcoming Fallen Angel crossover with Billy Tucci’s Shi. I was thrilled at the idea until it occurred to me that I may not be working on those issues. I was the regular artist on the series, but for the first time in 2 years, I requested 2 months off to work on X-Men Origins: Beast for Marvel.

Oh Well, I can still do the covers.

But more importantly, the Shi crossover lead to a much longer conversation about other potential Fallen Angel crossovers.

We came up with what must have been at least 30 of them, but I only remember 3: “Whedonverse” (Buffy/ Angel characters), Constantine and Spawn.

The “Whedonverse” idea eventually happened with Fallen Angels firs post series mini, Fallen Angel: Reborn. This was a 5 issue mini series that guest starred, Illyria(an Angel character played by Amy Acker) and it was loads of fun!

When I mentioned Constantine to Peter, He said, “They know each other! They would have to have an established history from page one.” He’d either thought of this before or, more likely, he’s just that quick when it comes to story and characters. We talked about this one for a while, but I don’t remember much because the conversation was almost 20 years ago. I know it opened at furors as Constantine walks in while Liandra(Fallen Angel) is at the bar knocking back a beer. I remember that from there, the story goes back to a “six weeks ago…” sequence, before returning to the current setting (Furor’s bar) where the climax of the story crashes through the wall in the form of the main bad guy whose Identity I’m not remembering. The thing I clearly remembered is that I loved what he came up with on the fly and I wished we weren’t just having a hypothetical conversation. I really wanted to do this!

Then there was the Spawn crossover. Again, I remember very little outside of Peter’s instant plot thoughts delighting me to no end! I remember only that Al Simmons(Spawn) had been imprisoned in hell by a rogue agent and Liandra had to go get him so they could together stop something from destroying everything.
…I know. It’s vague. But I’m old and it was almost 20 years ago. Like the Constantine conversation, It inspired me and this was the one that just possessed me(pun intended) this morning. I got up early and did an adhoc cover with the idea it wuld be an issue 1 cover to a 4 part mini-series titled, “Spawn:Descent”. (My apologies if this has already been used as a Spawn Title. I didn’t know) As I knew when Peter and I first had the conversation, its an idea that will never actually exist, but I just had to do the cover as if it did.

I’m delighted to share the finished cover here, along with some process shots:

early morning concept sketch. ink on 8.5 × 11 printer paper.

more to come….